Root Causes Quotes

Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth.

Criminals are not the victims of society; society is the victim of criminals.

In human affairs the solution to every problem contains within it the seeds of a new problem.

Who maintains the pubs and makes the peasants drunk? The peasant. Who embezzles the village, school, and parish funds and spends it all on drink? The peasant. Who robs his neighbor, sets fire to his house, and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? The peasant.

We have a violence problem in America. And no one is having a debate about the violence problem. And I think this is a missed opportunity to have an honest and open conversation in this country about why these horrifying things are happening, not simply what they're using to carry this out, but why are people doing this to begin with?

There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.

If you allow young folk to be abominably brought up and their characters corrupted little by little, from childhood; and if then you punish them as grown-ups for committing the crimes to which their training has consistently inclined them, what else is this, I ask, but first making thieves and then punishing them for it?

The wiping out of crime is so largely an economic question because much crime arises from the fact that children grow up in undesirable surroundings and have parents that have been conditioned by the same type of environment.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

Poverty is the parent of revolution.

Missing from much of the public debate is discussion of the simple fact that lurking behind every terroristic act is a specific political antecedent. That does not justify either the perpetrator or his political cause. Nonetheless, the fact is that almost all terrorist activity originates from some political conflict and is sustained by it as well.

True terrorism, you know, weaponized fear. In defense of ourselves, we're fighting - actively fighting something else. But if you're going to fight terrorism, to me, you fight the root causes of terrorism.

Problems of 35 years cannot be resolved in a short period of time.

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.

Why did the world ever become so unequal?

Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place?

Over the years, the government launched more than one 'war on corruption,' and they all failed. Why? Because they all started from the bottom up.

I think people are propelled towards violence, and what propels them is much more interesting than the actual act of violence itself.

We live in a culture that's been hijacked by the management consultant ethos. We want everything boiled down to a Power Point slide. We want metrics and 'show me the numbers.' That runs counter to the immensely complex nature of so many social, economic and political problems. You cannot devise an algorithm to fix them.

Ideas must counter ideas. You can drop all the bombs you want, but if you don't pull up weeds by their roots, they just grow back.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

When you say, "there's no reason [to hit a woman]" that kills any examination as to how two people ended up at that place. When you say, "there's no reason," you cut out the build-up and you're just left with the act. How you gonna solve it if you don't figure it out?

Daily we see how demographic change and uncertainty about what it means to be British is exploited by those with their own agenda; those who employ divisive rhetoric, engage in scapegoating and do nothing to tackle root causes of the insecurities people face.

I am not running for president in order to put Band-Aids on our problems.

Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.